Washington, North Carolina native Susan Dimock became the first woman member of the North Carolina Medical Society in 1872. When she died three years later at age 28, she was already a well-respected surgeon, author and medical educator. She merited a New York Times obituary and pallbearers drawn from the luminaries of Harvard Medical School. Dimock’s life was one of liminality—a Southerner who moved to Massachusetts in the middle of the Civil War, an American student in a Swiss medical school, a woman surgeon in orthodox male medicine. Dreesen’s exploration of Dimock’s life sheds light on women’s education in antebellum North Carolina, the entry of women into medicine, and the rise of nursing education, public health, and anti-sepsis procedures.